


Life Cycle

by ShevatheGun



Category: DC Animated Universe, Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Awkwardness, Death Threats, Enemies to Lovers, Established Relationship, F/M, Female!Lex Luthor, Grief/Mourning, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Tim being bitchy, Trans Female Character, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and back to enemies again occasionally, because...honestly he's under a lot of stress like let's cut the kid a break, death aftermath, her body is ambiguous and so are her morals, interpret her however you like my pretties, not a very healthy one, purposely anatomically ambiguous trans woman Lex, what timeline is this? who knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 12:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12841656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShevatheGun/pseuds/ShevatheGun
Summary: Clark doesn't feel equipped to handle what's just happened, so - for lack of a better idea - he runs to the one person in the world who might be.





	Life Cycle

**Author's Note:**

> I'm basically finding fics I wrote years ago and finally posting them. I wrote this fic almost two years ago now, close to the year anniversary of my grandmother's passing. I originally intended it to be a full series - hence why I never posted it - but upon review I think it's just fine as a standalone. It's unbeta'd, and in a few ways it shows its age... but my hope is that you'll like it. LLAP
> 
> For reference: "the Virtues" are Lex's all-female security team, referred to as such because they all have "virtuous" names (e.g. "Mercy," "Hope," "Charity," "Chastity," etc.)

He doesn’t know where he’s going until he gets there. Heck, he doesn’t know he’s leaving until he’s already left, tearing away from the rest of the League at top speed, going so fast and so far that even Wally can’t keep up and he doesn’t try – Clark hears him stop at Gotham’s city limits, and he doesn’t look back.

He can’t think. He can barely _see_. The sound barrier breaks over his face in a wave. The world moves by in a completely incomprehensible mess of color and shape and noise, and it’s by the grace of God he doesn’t hit anything before he’s tumbling through the pristine panoramic windows of the penthouse at LexCorp Tower West. Glass explodes around him like a crystal firework. He crashes headlong into the marble, taking a huge, man-sized gauge out of the floor, like a spaceship making land in a cornfield. 

That Lex comes through the door at that same moment is serendipity. The Virtues are swarming around her in a crowd, and some other LexCorp employees besides. She’s yelling – not at him, into a phone.

“Well, I’m telling you to _check again_ ,” she’s snarling. “And unless you provide me with evidence within the hour, I won’t just have your _job_ , Wilson, I’ll have your _head!_ ”

And then Mercy spots him and draws her gun, and the congregation draws to a halt. 

The world is spinning and Clark isn’t exactly sure how he got here. He’s not sure where here _is_ , exactly, and it feels like the noise and the incomprehensible chaos of information from the outside world has followed him in. He can’t breathe, and the Kryptonite in the barrel of Mercy’s gun feels like nothing. He’s numb to it. He’s numb to everything.

The only sound in the world that makes sense is right here in this room. He can hear it, but he doesn’t know what it is. He can’t think in words right now, only feelings, only impulses. Lex looks up from her phone call, and the emotion drains from her face. She closes herself, and he watches. She ends the call, and puts her hands in the pockets of her suit. Her eyes look sharp; there’s a fierce, fearful energy humming through her, he can taste it.

She closes herself as soon as she sees him and he moves forward without words, without thinking. Mercy takes the safety off her gun and he keeps walking. Hope and Charity and Temperance take aim at him, assembling around Lex like toy soldiers, and he keeps walking. 

“Stop,” Mercy snarls, and he keeps walking, and he sees the whites of her eyes and the glint of her teeth, and Lex stands, unmoving, and watches him come.

The Virtues all stand there, keeping their guns on him, but not shooting – he doesn’t know why they’re not shooting, but also he doesn’t care. He keeps walking, he keeps coming, because the only sound in the world that makes sense is getting louder, is getting nearer with each step that he takes. Lex doesn’t move, and so he walks until she’s near enough to touch, and then he jerks open her suit jacket so fast that he sees the button _ping_ off in slow motion, and then he wraps tight around her and presses his ear to her chest.

It’s Lex’s heartbeat, he realizes. The sound he’s hearing is Lex’s heartbeat, bold and loud and unyielding. Unapologetic and alive; that’s Lex Luthor. 

He can’t breathe. But Lex is breathing, slow and even. Lex is standing very still with her hands in her pockets, and her heart is beating against his cheek, through the silk of her tie and the cloth of her shirt. _Bh-bhm. Bh-bhm._ Not calm, but not too fast. Not quiet, but not too loud. Lex’s heart beats through his skin, rings through his head, and everything else drops away. His world is Lex’s heartbeat. He lives inside of Lex’s heartbeat.

Mercy presses her gun to the side of his head, and this close, the Kryptonite is _searing_. It could split his skin, and he almost recoils, making a sound like a wounded animal. But he can’t bring himself away from Lex’s body, and so he curls against her, arms wrapped tight around her waist.

Lex lifts her hand and after a moment Mercy pulls the gun away. 

“Call Alfred Pennyworth,” Lex says, softly. “And Commissioner Gordon.” Her voice betrays nothing.

Clark thinks of Alfred, thinks of Jim, and the fear, the grief, the profundity of loss tears through him anew. He almost loses his feet, but Lex’s hands are around his, holding tight. He’s shaking so hard he almost shakes her loose. He whimpers, makes a sound that feels like her name.

“What about him?” Mercy asks.

“We’ll be in the bedroom,” Lex says, and all at once, Clark is aware that he really, truly loves her, and it feels like losing a long, cold war. Loving Lex feels like the final defeat, as though admitting it to himself forces something out of him, something special and good. But he needs a heading, he needs a direction, he needs a world to live in that makes some kind of sense, and Lex is all of that. Lex will make decisions. That’s what Lex does.

* * *

The door closes, swallowing the noise of the outside world, and Clark can finally think again, for the first time in what feels like hours.

“Lay down,” Lex says, in that same, quiet voice. She isn’t looking at him; she’s looking at her phone. He refuses to let go of her. She puts a hand on his chest, keeping him at arm’s length, holding the phone to her ear.

He hears it ring, and she glances at him. Her face is blank. 

“Lay down,” she says again, a little colder, this time, and he lets go of her slowly. The room feels too big around him, like he could get lost in it. He lets go of Lex, and his body feels too big for him. His cape hangs limply around his shoulders, large pieces bitten through it by the glass. His knees are smeared chalky white from the marble he so unceremoniously powdered. 

He takes the cape off, listening to Lex’s voice, but not her words. Deep as always, with a thin veneer of arrogance, a dash of ever-present spite. She’s agitated, words quick and sharp, like she’s trying to hurt the world with just the serrated edge of her silver tongue. There’s something more to it, though; he’s not sure what it is. He unhooks the clasps of his uniform and peels it away from his skin. There’s something more to it. There are ripples of something moving through Lex’s voice, something lingering underneath the surface of her. 

He toes off his boots and shucks off his pants, and looks down at the little pile of himself on the floor, red and blue covered in powdered marble. He should fold it up, put it somewhere. He doesn’t know where. 

_Somewhere safe_ , a voice in his head says. _Lex Luthor knows enough of your secrets, and she’s not to be trusted with any of them._

The voice makes him feel like he’s about to shake apart, and then he feels Lex’s fingers at the base of his spine, sliding upwards. She trails her fingernails up his back, between his shoulder blades, and then she cups the back of his neck, squeezes soft, and the shaking stops. 

“Lay down,” she murmurs, and this time he listens. He steps over his cape, away from her, leaving a piece of himself in her soft, pink palm, and lays flat on his stomach on her bed. The sheets smell like her, but only faintly. Mostly, they smell clean and empty. He feels carved open.

Lex hangs up the phone and takes off her shoes, and then she sits down on the edge of the bed. For a long time, it feels like, she simply sits there, back straight, shoulders too. Suit straight, face too, though Clark can’t see it. He turns his head and tries to read her through the back of her head.

He makes a sound – a soft noise – that feels like her name. He doesn’t have the strength to reach for her.

“I could kill you too,” she says, so softly it’s almost to herself. “Right now. It would be so simple.”

She turns to regard him over her left shoulder, and he can read less from her face than he could from the back of her head.

“Two of you in one day,” Lex says. “Can you imagine? I could make it look like self-defense. Or suicide. I could take down the whole League by week’s end. It would be so _easy_.”

Clark watches her without moving, because he can’t, and Lex watches him back, and finally reaches out her hand and draws it slowly through his hair.

“You can’t do this to me, Clark.” She runs her thumb along his temple, and his eyes slip shut. 

“Lex,” he says, softly, and he’s sure it’s her name this time. Lex. The hard pit in his peach heart. The arsenic taste of crushed apple seeds. The brightest, coldest star in the darkest corner of the sky. True North. 

“Lex,” he says, and she runs her fingers through his hair, and if she does actually kill him, he won’t hold it against her. Hurting him is in her nature. It comes as easily to her as breathing.

* * *

Lex finally brings her legs up onto the bed, and he falls asleep with his face pressed to thigh. Her hand cradles the back of his head, fingers petting through the hair at the nape of his neck.

He wakes up cold, shaking, Bruce’s voice in his head. Lex is gone from his side, and panic rushes through his blood before he hears her heartbeat from the bathroom, and she emerges with her face damp and clean just as he springs up to go to her. Her eyes look smaller without makeup.

She gives him a look – mostly tired, a little skeptical – and he sits back down before she can tell him to. She doesn’t have to, either; his legs give out almost without his permission.

She walks around the bed and sits down, carefully, as if next to a stranger. 

“I’m going to go view the body in a few hours,” she says. “Lois is on her way from Blüdhaven to collect you.”

“No,” Clark says, because he isn’t ready to be collected, not by Lois or anyone else, and Bruce isn’t a _body_ , Bruce isn’t—

“I need to see him for myself,” Lex says, and Clark’s shocked silent by her honesty. 

His stomach aches, and he can’t breathe. His grief inflates inside him, pressing up against his ribs. 

“I’ll go with you,” Clark says, voice breaking on every word.

Lex doesn’t look at him. “That isn’t what we are to one another, Clark.”

_Then what are you?_ Bruce’s voice asks him, and Clark doesn’t know. He never has.

He can’t lay down again, because if he does the grief will flood him, invade every part of his body. So he sits, shoulders against the headboard of Lex’s bed, body aching.

“I need to go with you,” he says, finally.

Lex shakes her head, not looking at him. “No.” 

“I _want_ to go with you.”

“What you want is of no interest to me.”

“You can’t stop me,” Clark says.

“Actually, I can,” Lex says. “And I will, if need be. One would hope you’d be smart enough not to tempt me my darker instincts, right now. But I suppose brains never were your marketing appeal.”

Clark tries to measure his breathing, but every time he inhales, Lex comes with it, shea butter and her cinnamon cologne. He can taste her in the back of his mouth. The sound of her heartbeat is making him dizzy.

Her phone rings, and she turns her head. She won’t look at him, and he needs her to. He needs to be seen, he needs Lex to see him, and so he grabs her phone too fast for her to stop him and crushes it with a careless flex of his fingers. It sparks and pops against the skin of his palm, and he squeezes it until the metal is all but oozing from between his fingers.

Lex looks very slowly from his hand to his face, like she’s waiting for the punchline.

“You can’t stop me,” Clark says, because he knows Lex well enough to know when she needs a show of force to be convinced of something.

“Yes,” Lex says, “I can,” and then she’s grabbing for him. He tosses the smoking, crumpled metal of her phone away and opens his mouth a little for the kiss that’s coming. Lex bites into him and he makes a soft, obedient noise to assuage her. 

“I can destroy you in an instant,” Lex says into his mouth, “like it’s nothing.” Her words tickle his skin. 

“Lex,” he whispers, and after that, they don’t say anything at all for a long time.

* * *

When he wakes up again, Lex is still there. He’s laying against her naked chest, listening to her heartbeat, his arm thrown over her stomach. He smells tobacco, looks up to find her smoking, staring out over the city, the skin bathed in the blue glow of Metropolis. He can feel her hand slowly moving against the back of his neck, holding him to her.

“Gordon said it was both of them,” she says, softly, her voice strangely even, and he wonders how she knew he was awake. “Together. That’s what Wilson called about. But I suppose you already knew that.” 

She takes a long drag off her cigarette, and the light of the city catches in her long eyelashes, her full lips. It drips over her clavicle and her shoulders, down her stomach. Clark can’t hear the traffic, but he can hear her heart, hear her lungs inflate, full of smoke.

She breathes out, and Clark hears that too.

“Ouroboros,” she says, and smoke is catching at her teeth, licking her lips. “That’s what it reminded me of.”

She takes another drag off her cigarette.

“Shall we kill one another now while the killing is good, or shall we wait a few more years?”

Clark sits up slowly, rolling over. He slides on top of her and Lex pulls her cigarette from her mouth and lies back, blowing smoke in his face.

“I don’t want to kill you,” Clark murmurs.

“Give it time,” Lex says, flatly. 

“I’m not,” Clark says, voice still soft. “I won’t.”

Lex scoffs and stabs her cigarette out on the gleaming glass of her nightstand. “That seems like a waste of perfectly good situational irony.”

Clark needs her to believe him, because he means it. He really means it. If Lex kills him, that’s her business. But killing Lex has never been in the cards, for him. 

And he thinks about it – thinks about Lex walking through that door, seeing him, just moments after learning Bruce and Joker had finally reached their inevitable conclusion. He thinks about Lex looking at him, and seeing Death itself standing in her living room, painted in the wreckage of all her finery. He thinks about what she must’ve been steeling herself for as he came closer. He thinks about how she stood there, not blinking, not moving, not flinching from him; making no move to defend herself from him. Accepting it.

He kisses her soft and slow as honey, and Lex’s fingers dig into his shoulder and the back of his head. Her lips are hot, chapped from the cigarette, and he can taste the smoke in her mouth, like something inside her is still burning, a fire raging out of control. He kisses her slow and gentle, cupping her cheeks.

“I won’t,” he whispers. “Never.”

Lex kisses him, sharp and hard, tearing into and away from him, both at once.

“You will. I will, too. That’s what we are to one another. That’s what this is.” She presses her hand to his throat as if she could hurt him like this. Maybe she can. Lex is nothing if not a testament to the strength of human willpower. 

“We aren’t them,” Clark says, because he _can’t_ be Bruce, and Lex has _never_ been Joker. That’s what Bruce doesn’t understand, Clark thinks. He never has. Clark and Lex aren’t terminal by design. They are and always have been terminal by choice – terminal by pure stubbornness alone.

Lex’s hand moves over his throat, squeezing, testing the skin, before she slides it up, under his chin, over his nose and mouth. He breathes out against her palm, kisses it soft. She takes her hand away, pulls his hair, but he doesn’t move his head. 

“I didn’t come here to kill you,” Clark says.

Lex hums. “Consider me disappointed, but not surprised.”

“Lex,” Clark says, “I don’t want to live in a world without you in it.”

Lex is still for a moment, staring at him, and then she closes her eyes tight and curls around him in a way she never does – legs up over his hips, arms around his neck, stomach pressed to his stomach, chest pressed to his chest. Her heart’s beating fast as a hummingbird’s, banging like a tin cup against the bars of her ribcage, and she’s holding her breath against his neck. Clark presses her tight to him, holds her there. His entire body hurts in a way he can’t put into words, and Lex fills a space inside him, roots against the crater in his chest like it was made for her. 

“Stay,” Lex whispers in his ear, and he doesn’t know how not to, but he doesn’t tell her that. 

He wants to say, _‘Keep me. Let me keep you, too.’_

He doesn’t. He stays quiet and close, pain and grief flowing through him like a river, and in a few minutes, he’s asleep again.

* * *

Conner finds them like that; naked and twisted together like so much soldered metal. He pushes through the door around three am, Mercy close behind him.

“Mom,” he says, sharply, and then, on sight of them, he recoils. “Oh, _ew_! Come on, guys, _really_?”

Clark sighs into Lex’s skin, rolling away so she can get up. Conner makes a strangled noise and recoils, shielding his eyes from her naked body. 

“Ma’am,” Mercy snarls, like this is really more than she can possibly be expected to tolerate without shooting a few people, and Conner turns his head and calls out into the foyer. 

“He’s in here!” he yells. “I found him.”

Tim Drake appears in the doorway in full Red Robin regalia and jerks back with the same noise Conner made just a second ago. The metal feathers of his wings clatter together. “Oh, for—”

Clark sits up and drags his hands down his face. It’s tingling, weirdly, pain sharp behind his eyes. He watches Lex move across the room and open her armoire; Mercy follows close behind her, talking in short, sharp bursts, like artillery fire. Lex draws her fingers over her racks of clothes; strangely slow, like she’s still sleeping.

Conner comes back into the room, still shielding his eyes, and thrusts a pile of clothing at Clark. “We need to go,” he says, and Clark can hear, now, how accusatory and ragged his voice is, like he’s been crying for hours. He seems to be trying to avoid letting their skin touch. “Everybody’s freaking out looking for you.” 

Clark takes the clothes – jeans, underwear, and a plain t-shirt. He doesn’t apologize. He’s never been exactly sure how to apologize to Conner. He’s never really known where to start.

“Call Fox,” Lex is saying to Mercy in a low voice. “If we need to get involved, we will. Tell him that.”

“That wasn’t the plan,” Mercy protests. “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for, everything’s in place.”

“The plan’s changed,” Lex says, more sharply, and Clark makes a conscious choice to stop eavesdropping, because it’s making him nauseous. 

He puts on the underwear and the jeans, and shrugs the t-shirt over his head. His skin feels like it belongs to someone else. He pads slowly out of the room, like out of a dream. He feels dizzy, like he’s spinning dangerously off-kilter, almost drunk. Tim is standing by the door, arms folded so tight across his chest it looks like its cutting off circulation.

“This is where you run to when the going gets tough?” he asks. Beneath the domino mask, his plain, pretty face is twisted into a mean, ugly shape that doesn’t suit him. He shakes his head, looks away - mutters, which means the words aren't technically meant for him. “Superman and his Supermess.”

Clark doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t really care what Tim thinks, and the boy’s hurting. Kids don’t really understand grief, Clark thinks. They don’t understand loss. They’re not supposed to.

“Everyone’s looking to you for _leadership_ , right now,” Tim spits. 

Clark agrees with him that that much is ironic. He's always felt that way. But he doesn’t say so. He says, instead, “Do you need a ride home?”

“I can take him,” Conner says, coming out of the bedroom. “It’s fine.”

“Reversing something of this magnitude—” Mercy says, and Clark can just barely hear her. He hears Lex snap back though, loud and clear:

“Mercy,” she snarls, “I don’t pay you for financial or legal advice. If you’d like a lateral promotion, you can speak to HR.”

“The guy’s _dead_ , Lex,” Mercy says, coldly. “It’s not as if he’s going to mind.”

“Come on,” Clark says, gently. “We can fly back to Gotham.”

“Lois said Temperance or somebody called her,” Conner says. “She’s still on her way, you should at least wait for her to get here so she can park her car. Or… whatever. I mean, I don’t know. You can do what you want. I don’t… really know what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“You talked to Lois?” Clark asks.

“We talked to everyone,” Tim says, accusingly. “No one knew where you were.”

“I was gonna ask—Lex,” Conner says, but Clark hears his tongue snag on her name, like he doesn’t feel right saying it. “But… you were here, so. Problem solved, I guess.”

“You can call her ‘Mom’,” Clark says. “It doesn’t bother me.” 

“It bothers _me_ ,” Tim says.

“ _Lex_ ,” Mercy says loudly, from the bedroom, and Clark hears the mirror smash, and he’s back through the door before he can stop himself, across the room to her side. He gathers her clenched fist against him, holds it against his chest, and puts his other hand on her chest. She’s breathing too fast; her heartbeat is a taiko drum, vicious and loud. Her blood is hot against his palm. The glass of the mirror is scattered across the carpet like shards of moonlight.

“Lex,” he says, “hey,” and he cradles her head and pulls her to his chest. She’s hyperventilating, whole body rigid like she’s ready to run, like she’s ready to fight. “Hey,” he says, softly, and she makes a choked, angry noise against his neck, beats her uninjured fist against his shoulder.

“I can’t,” she says, and he can barely hear her voice over the run-away-train of her heart. “Gotham,” she says. “I can’t. There’s nothing—I can’t.”

“I don’t think anyone can,” Clark whispers, with a dawning understanding of what she means. 

“I can’t fix it.”

“I know.”

“He,” Lex starts, and she can’t finish. She breathes hard for a second, and Clark presses her a little closer, and she makes another angry noise. She hits him again, and she yells, sharp and short into his chest like it's a pillow. She snarls and twists against him like she’s trying to escape and he holds her still, holds her closer.

Tim and Conner are standing in the doorway, watching. Mercy has gotten some distance, still staring at Clark like he’s an interloper, but staring at Lex, now, like she’s a stranger too, like she’s transformed into something Mercy can’t recognize.

There’s a certain fairness in that. Lex and Bruce were friends once, but Clark never saw it. Not but rarely. This is as surreal to him as to the rest of them. 

But there’s a part that thinks maybe he knew better than he thinks he did. Maybe he knew. Maybe that’s part of what chased him here, into her house, into her bed, where her heart beats the loudest. Maybe he needed someone who’d lost what he lost.

Not Batman, but Bruce. 

The world continues turning without his best friend in it, and he’s already broken open, pried himself apart in an insane attempt to hold himself together, so he holds Lex as she does too, as though it’s a transformation they need to make together.

“Tell me this is happening,” Lex says, softly, after her breath has calmed and her heartbeat is quiet again. "I need to hear it from you."

“This is happening,” Clark says, and it feels like telling himself. “It’s… this is real. This is really happening.”

Lex is very still for a moment, and then she nods and pushes away from him, decoupling them. She holds her bleeding hand out to Mercy, who retreats to the bathroom and comes back with the first aid kit to begin taking the glass from her skin with tweezers.

Clark glances down to find her blood on his t-shirt. 

“Do you have a clean shirt I can borrow?”

“Don’t wear those,” Lex says. “Wear the costume.”

Conner and Tim jump aside as Hope enters the room, Charity close behind. Hope holds Clark’s costume out to him, freshly laundered, and he takes it from her with a quick ‘thank you.’ Charity pulls her hair back and begins examining Lex’s hand, ostensibly to see if she needs stitches.

Clark whips into the costume at top speed and puts the civs on the edge of Lex’s bed. 

“Ms. Lane is downstairs for you,” Hope says to him, looking dour. 

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”

“What do we do?” Conner asks. “How does this… What’re we supposed to be doing?”

“Go back to Gotham,” Lex says, buttoning her shirt as Charity makes noises of concern, trying to grab her injured hand back. “Gordon’s holding the story until morning, but it won’t make a difference. The criminal element’s going to know before first light, and it’s going to be a free-for-all.”

“So, what? We keep them in line?” Conner asks, and Clark’s reminded of how much those of the House of El crave a commanding presence like Lex. Like Bruce. Conner came here for the same reason Clark did. He needs Lex to tell him what to do next. 

“No,” Lex says. “The family needs to do that. Contact the Gordon girl, Grayson, and Todd. I don’t care which channels you use. They need to be the faces of this. Find them, put them in the spotlight, and then keep the peace. _Quietly_ ,” she adds, jabbing her finger at Clark’s chest as if he’s never heard of subtlety before. “You’re there to support the family and to express your condolences for the immense loss Gotham and the world at large are about to contend with. We aren’t looking to adopt another city.”

“We’re going to out him,” Clark says, softly.

Lex scoffs, shaking her head, and plucking earrings from a box Hope holds out to her. “Too late for that. We crossed that bridge hours ago. He’s out. It’s done. The world’s going to know Bruce Wayne was Batman. We need to prioritize the identities of the living. You’ll all need cover stories,” she tells Tim. “I’m sending Honor, Verity, and Peace ahead to create them.” She looks to Conner. “I need you to loop Dinah and the Titans in, we’ll need their help.”

“And I guess I’ll just sit on my thumbs,” Tim says, darkly. 

“Not if you want to keep Wayne Enterprises in the family you won’t,” Lex says as Mercy ties her tie and Hope helps her into her jacket. 

Tim straightens, anger giving way to surprise for a single, flickering second before the flame fans up again, bigger than ever. Lex glances over at him surreptitiously.

“I assume that _is_ what you want.”

“It is,” Tim says, not taking his eyes off her for a second. “What’s your point?”

Temperance comes through the door with a thick manila folder and several binders, offering each to Lex in turn. Lex flicks through them quickly, eyes scanning the paper. “Grayson doesn’t have a mind for business, and Todd’s still legally dead. Gordon and Brown were never Bruce’s legal wards; Cain is personally incompatible with the lifestyle. Damian Wayne,” she says, “is eleven. You’re the obvious choice.”

“I’m seventeen,” Tim says.

“I was nineteen,” Lex says. “You’ll manage.” 

She takes the folders and binders from Temperance and holds them out to Tim, who accepts them warily.

“What is all this?”

“Study material,” Lex says. “Temperance will get your clothes. You’re riding with me. You have your first meeting with the board in four hours.”

“And what are you gonna do?” Tim asks, like he already knows the answer.

“I’m going to help you prevent a hostile takeover,” Lex says. “Obviously.”

“Why?” Tim asks, and Clark finds himself wondering the same thing.

“Because I feel like it,” Lex says, stepping into the shoes Charity lays at her feet. “Hope, go downstairs and collect Ms. Lane, if you would. Offer her breakfast, a shower, and an exclusive in exchange for her cooperation wrangling the press. Meet us in Gotham at 9.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hope says with a nod, and then she pushes past Conner and Tim, and disappears into the elevator.

Lex moves out of the room and it feels like a riptide catches Clark by the ankles. He finds himself being swept out after her, the Virtues hemming them in, Conner on Lex’s left side and Tim on Clark’s right. They cross the living room and, awash in himself, Clark takes comfort in being directed. In being told what to do. In asking questions and getting answers. Simple arithmetic, like the situation can be broken down into simple steps of three words or less. Go to Gotham. Keep the peace. Listen to Lex. Save the world. Mourn Bruce Wayne.

The unbroken panes of the panoramic windows hum and separate at their approach. Lex stops at the edge of the floor, glistening marble tucked beneath her feet as Clark takes his first steps out into the air. He feels empty and cold, but he knows where he’s going. He knows how he got here. 

Conner follows him out, hesitantly. The early morning wind feathers through the coarse curls of his hair, and Clark watches him for a moment; blood of his blood, son of the woman who is both his greatest foe and his secret friend. Superboy to his Superman. Kon-El. His child, searching for the right thing to say, the right thing to do. 

He reaches for Conner’s hand and holds it in his. Conner looks over at him, startled, but then he squeezes back, like he’s been waiting for Clark to do it all along. There’s a scared, hopeful light in his eyes, like he thinks Clark can somehow fix this. Clark refuses to disappoint him just yet.

He looks back across the space at Lex, and finds her watching them, hands in her pockets. Ouroboros, Clark thinks. The endless cycle. Here they are again, together and apart in every possible way, singular and dual, both at once. 

_Give me a direction_ , he wants to say.

Instead, he draws close, cups her cheek, and kisses her, in front of their son, and in front of Bruce’s legacy. Lex’s lips are warm, and even with the city buzzing around him, he can hear her heartbeat, taste her determination. Unapologetic and alive; that’s Lex Luthor.

“I’ll patch into the League communication network,” she says, softly, as he pulls away. 

“Thank you,” he says, because he can’t stop himself.

And then, because he wishes he’d said it more, wishes he’d said it right then, when Bruce was vanishing from beneath his own skin: “I love you.” _I always have_ , he doesn’t say. _I always will._

Tim visibly jerks back – Mercy and the Virtues go rigid, a few reaching, falteringly, for their weapons. But Lex stands, unmoving, eyes sliding slowly over Clark’s face, as though documenting every piece of it, every shape of him. As though she’s listening, hard, to hear his heartbeat over the sound of the wind and the city.

“I know,” she says. 

And he’s sure, right then, that she sees him.


End file.
